A misinformation war in Florida, and on Twitter

The aftermath of any school shooting is terrible, and today was worse than most. After a 19-year-old man walked into a South Florida high school and killed 17 people, outlets raced to sort fact from fiction. And while that’s always the case in the day after an obscene crime spree like this one, journalists reported a brand-new and disturbing phenomenon: fake tweets impersonating their authentic accounts, rewritten to be inflammatory and discourage them from doing their work.

The result of those tweets was that the journalists faced an onslaught of abuse on Twitter, during a critical time when they were using it for reporting purposes. Here’s Poynter:

Alex Harris was one of the first journalists to reach out to victims at the scene on Twitter. It’s a practice she’d gotten used to as a breaking news reporter at the Miami Herald, where she covered the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando during her second week on the job.

One of Harris’ early replies quickly went viral. Within 45 minutes, she was getting a barrage of harassment from random Twitter users. Someone made a screenshot of a fake tweet alleging that she had asked someone for photos or videos of dead bodies. She decided to ignore the hoax and report it to Twitter instead.

It’s difficult to tell how it impacted the reporting she was able to do, but she thinks it probably had an effect. “I think it genuinely might have made a difference to some of the people I reached out to,” she said.

Harris has covered shootings before, including at the Pulse nightclub and Fort Lauderdale airport. This is the worst online abuse she’s ever received.

“I had literally thousands of messages and they just filled up my mentions and DMs with terrible, racist, sexist, horrific, graphic death threats,” she said. “I got Facebook messages sent directly to my private account that had the same content too. I’ve never experienced anything like it before.”

Renee DiResta had a good thread on this: “Twitter’s party line here is a pathetic cop-out: ‘Twitter’s open and real-time nature is a powerful antidote to the spreading of all types of false information. We, as a company, should not be the arbiter of truth.’ They need to be the arbiter of *integrity* in these situations.”

Meanwhile, mainstream sources spent the day essentially debating with one another whether the suspect was or was not a member of a white supremacist group. (Local law enforcement said late Thursday that he was not, though this did not seem likely to be the last word on the matter, and the suspect had posted a variety of racist and murdery comments on various social media sites.) Given the high stakes, I wish some outlets had shown more restraint before publishing what they had been told. But on a breaking national news story that is being live-tweeted by the victims, restraint can feel like too much to hope for.

We started the week talking about what Charlie Warzel calls the “Infocalypse” — the moment where, thanks largely to artificial intelligence, we can no longer easily distinguish between fact and fiction. On this miserable news day, it felt like that moment had already arrived.

Here’s a substantial study likely to be totally overlooked in today’s awful news cycle — and yet it offers important evidence that Russians did their most effective work not by spreading fake news but by amplifying legitimate stories. Highly recommended for all Interface readers:

“The Kremlin, they don’t need to create a false narrative. It’s already there,” he said. “You’re just taking a narrative and elevating it.”

Some well-chronicled hoaxes reached large audiences. But Russian-controlled Twitter accounts, Albright said, were far more likely to share stories produced by widely read sources of American news and political commentary. The stories themselves were generally factually accurate, but the Russian accounts carefully curated the overall flow to highlight themes and developments that bolstered Republican Donald Trump and undermined his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

I wish I had more time today to write about the implications of Katie Notopoulos’s delicious story about how she took Facebook’s advice for creating the most “engaging” post possible and wound up alienating all of her friends. The disconnect between what’s considered engaging to us and to the best machine learning money can buy is staggering. Read this, too:

People are being served the same stale content from a friend for 12 days straight, just because it happens to have a lot of comments. No one wanted to see my post several times a day, but the algorithm had, once again, misjudged what people wanted. In fact, people really hated this video — they wanted it to go away. Facebook took their pleas for it to stop as a sign that they should be shown it more and more. It’s enough to almost make you nostalgic for those Russian chaos agents.

On Tuesday we told you about the “sexy graft video,” in which the deputy prime minister of Russia was caught “relaxing” on a yacht with an escort. He demanded the video be removed from all platforms, and how those platforms react could determine whether they will continue to be available in Russia. Today, Instagram blinked:

Instagram has blocked posts in Russia relating to corruption claims made by the country’s most prominent opposition leader.

It follows a demand by the country’s internet censor that the Facebook-owned service restrict access to posts on its platform connected to allegations made by Alexei Navalny.

Businesses and philanthropic organizations can now offer help on Facebook during times of crisis:

Facebook has been evolving its Safety Check feature over the last year, adding complementary capabilities to go alongside it and building it into a crisis hub. Last February, Facebook introduced Community Help, a feature that allowed users to find and provide help during a crisis and in September, it launched Crisis Response, a one-stop spot where people could access Safety Check, Community Help and media, like articles and videos, related to an ongoing crisis. Now, Facebook has announced some changes to Community Help that will allow organizations and businesses to post in the forum rather than just individuals.

Do you ever read a miles-long stretch of despairing tweets about the state of the world and wish it wasn’t so chill? Nw you can supplement the existential death screams of planet Earth with live local news broadcasts right in your browser?

Twitter is starting to show live, local news broadcasts in a live streaming window next to its timeline during major breaking news events.

Twitter’s initiative to air these videos is currently rolled out across the platform, a company spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News. The company will rely on a set of partnerships with local news stations to select the footage.

Twitch has released a new place for gamers to trade slurs and redpill one another while playing Overwatch:

Amazon-owned streaming giant Twitch today announced the launch of a chat room feature that will exist outside the standard Twitch chat that lives on the righthand side of live streams. The company is calling the new product Rooms, and these chats will be both public and private chats streamers can set up for viewers and subscribers to interact with a streamer and each other around dedicated topics or themes. For instance, a streamer could set up a chat room specifically for subscribers only and leave it open 24 hours a day, even when that streamer is not live, so discussions can take place at around the clock and even when the channel is inactive.

Unsurprisingly considering Sinclair’s previous work, ‘sodes is a beautiful app. Perhaps my favorite designed area is the Now Playing view; after I first tried it, going back to another app’s Now Playing screen was painful. The app especially shines on the iPhone X’s full-width display. As was highlighted in Federico and John’s discussion on AppStories last year, an indie app’s little human touches can elicit such delight – and 'sodes is a great example of that.

Done right, Facebook Matchmaker would hardly exist for anyone who doesn’t want it. It wouldn’t generate tons of unrequited “Yes” swipes. And it’d only result in rare matches. But those matches would be meaningful, because they weren’t coerced, and they didn’t occur on an app designed for finding one-night hookups. They’d be people from whom you already accepted friend requests, in your network, with whom you might already have a lot in common.

In 150 matches, individually sorted and approved by two different people, only one actually transforms into a meeting. With Tinder and similar apps, I hardly ever actually meet anyone, given the number of people I reach mutual approval with. My theory about this is that Tinder is not actually for meeting anyone.

Certainly I would not make the argument that dating apps are pleasant all the time, or that a dating app has helped find everlasting love for every person who has ever sought it, but it’s time to stop throwing anecdotal evidence at a debate that has already been ended with numbers. You don’t care about my Tinder stories and I don’t care about yours. Love is possible and the data says so.